I’ll bet you are tired about hearing how my day went at school all the time. Let’s talk about some other stuff.
I download three television shows a week to watch on my computer. Obviously I cannot watch American TV without a satellite dish, so that leaves me to pulling them off the internet, which is no doubt illegal. It’s a bit of a gray area, though, since the shows are free to begin with – as opposed to movies which cost money to see.
Anyway, it’s interesting to watch the shows without any other outside stimuli relating to them. For example, I am never hanging around the tea machine at work when somebody says “Holy cow, did you see Survivor last night?” I never see commercials for my shows, so I have no idea what is happening during the next one, and I never see any interviews either. In short, I’m watching TV in a vacuum. It’s nice to focus just on the show, without any distractions.
Last night I tutored three students for one hour. I guess it was a hit – on the way back they told Miyake sensei that they really enjoyed it, and they are looking forward to meeting again next month. They said that I made them comfortable by being so friendly and by making jokes. I’ve found that the more comfortable the students are, the more likely they will try hard to use English.
An interesting note about last night’s tutoring. Each student paid 3000 yen for the one hour session. That means that I made 9000 yen in an hour – about $80. That means that I made in one hour sitting around in my living room chatting with Japanese girls in English what I used to make in a week of part time work lifting and sorting boxes of books in the back room of Barnes & Noble. Wow.
Persimmons are in season here, and they are everywhere. There are trees full of them, and the shelves of the stores are also loaded with persimmons. I hadn’t really tried persimmons in America, but here in Japan they are quite good. There is a really sweet seedless kind that is probably some kind of genetically modified version, and then there is a harder, less sweet version with big seeds inside. Both are good, for different reasons. We’ve got lots of persimmons in the house nowadays, so I’m eating them all the time. Soon oranges will be in season, and I tend to go nut with those. They sell these tiny little oranges that peel really easily – and they are cheap, too. I think in America we would call them tangerines.
I was dreaming today about some good American beers at work. I read an article about some premium Japanese beers that you could order by mail. They’ve got a good reputation, and so I looked into them at their website. By the time I figured out the cost, they would work out to about 400 yen a bottle. It dawned on me soon afterwards that I can buy three kinds of Anchor Steam beers from San Francisco right next door at Ito Yokado for about 350 yen a bottle. The answer was right under my nose….
Just in case you are dying for an update on how my classes went, I put in the busiest day of my easy week. I had three classes in a row in the afternoon. The last class was a combined first year class of 40 students. Those combo classes are always interesting. I have built a rapport with both halves of the class separately, so when everybody gets together then the chemistry is all different, and it’s like starting over. The students are used to learning together, but not with me around. The noisy kids that usually are a disturbance might be sitting next to a big guy that doesn’t like it when I get interrupted – girls that are quiet might be next to their best friend and they will chatter away. It makes it a lot more interesting.
Tonight Kuniko is coming home late because she has an English teacher’s meeting after work. She said she’d be home around nine… wow! She’ll be nice and exhausted by the time Sunday rolls around.
